


Weathered

by bluebottle762



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games)
Genre: F/M, References to Depression, Stream of Consciousness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-28
Updated: 2016-05-28
Packaged: 2018-07-10 17:39:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,418
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6998152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluebottle762/pseuds/bluebottle762
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>We are tired, weathered people. We have seen and felt and heard, altogether far too much. So with a smile, if you’ll permit me, I propose a dance. A weaving set of complex steps through all the grief and hope and conflict to come, and we shall call it living.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Weathered

We started apart, as all lovers do, but even then our independent choices had a similar ring to them. You, cornered into taking a mantle of responsibility and traditions that have forever felt cold and alien to you, just to escape, to move forward with your life. Me, a contract no one wanted, foolish and plaintive, a means to an end. The connecting factor? Desperation and your life.

You didn’t want to die. I didn’t want to kill you.

The next part I will have to chalk to your youth, although I am eternally grateful, of course, but you let me live. More than that, you brought me into your party, despite the onslaught of voices against me. You gave me something you’d always longed for but never had: A chance. A mistake, I’m sure. Even now, you have a tendency to make decisions shoulders first, head and heart be damned to forceful compromise – half way between the two but with the sense of neither. It’s still endearing, if prone to conflict.

Your hair was short then, I remember, although not like it is now – kept close to the scalp, practical but soft as velvet beneath a lover’s hand – a hasty cut, made choppy by inexpert hands that sought to remove an annoyance and nothing more. Thin and young with the look of a fresh soldier about you, armour not quite right, sword still a little too heavy… You grew into it gloriously. Truth be told, when I first saw you, I took you for a boy of sixteen, nervous and unsteady. Then you opened your mouth. I do not know if you have always been so commanding, but certainly, since I first met you, you had the attitude down to an, admittedly, somewhat aggressive perfection. I have been told before that my taste in women is ‘peculiar’, but if you are what ‘peculiar’ has to offer, then I will take it whole heartedly and without complaint.

I don’t have to tell you of the winding conversations that followed, carving out our familiarity like a landscape, how they knotted and twined until they became not just words, but actions also. A hand finding mine in the cold, tears in the dark, trembling thighs and curling toes, comfort found in hands and heat, soft words in silence. There is a passion in you, a need to survive, to rise above branded perceptions and exist without apology- and it’s still the most beautiful thing I have ever encountered. Being close enough to see it brings forth other observations however. There are thorns around your rib cage, a network of hurt, curling inward to one grey rose that beats in time with your pulse, inseparable from your being – just as much who you are as that burning need to stay alive. It blooms under pressure most. It’s petals desperate tears, silenced into shaking shoulders hunched against the world, their shape the crescent marks left tracked into your skin; a brail of lover’s worry. The fight is endless, but I will win what battles I can, not for you, but with you. You are wrong on one count, however. Your faltering is not an unforgivable weakness, but a necessary one. You cannot be strong with every breath you draw, it would kill you.

My words make this thing inside you seem beautiful. It is not. It is a winding, destructive thing, and I have seen and felt it’s handiwork before. There are streets in Antiva city that are overgrown with it’s twisting thorns, spilling freely from thicketed lungs, looping it’s way through slums and brothels like smoke in a glass – confined and sinister. I’ve seen first-hand those who it consumed, each one little more than hollow shells in death – heavy with tar-like tendrils, and tinted with that persistent grey which lingers even after the eyes have closed to will the image away.

I swear on all I believe, I will not let you fall to it. I’ve almost lost you to so much else; I will not let it be that.

Ironic then, that it was _my_ actions that almost killed you. You argue that we are equally to blame, if blame must be had, but that is not what I choose to believe.  Seeing you so pale, so drained of life and cold- it made my chest seize and stop – all life bringing activity running still as the ice cold mud of dread replaced the blood in my veins. A prolonged accident - one that tested our endurance, our allegiances - but ultimately brought two things into our lives, pin point clear and primal. The joy came first, but after that, the all-consuming fear. Having survived an archdemon, countless darkspawn, bandits, and maker knows what else… to have potentially lost you to _childbirth_...

We named her Unna.

Carrying her was hard on you, harder than you’ll ever admit in words – but words are not a currency with which you have ever bartered. It showed in the hunch of your shoulders, the bow of your head, and the restlessness that crowded your sleep as normal life became harder and harder to navigate. Rightly, you were afraid, not just of the physical process, but the ever present judgement of those around you. It was a hard won battle to make them see you as a Warden before anything else, and the threat of toppling the image was too great to allow you carrying her to be public. We had to hide it. That we still have to hide is a hurt that has no easy solution. Being the child of a Warden and a rogue Crow makes her an easy target – to pull on you or I, it doesn’t matter.

It’s an all-consuming fear, raising a child. Her safety, her wellbeing, her future – all these things and more coil up inside my chest like vipers, twisting into a boiling mass of anxiety strong enough to put the shake back into my hands. I admit this is something that is beyond me, where I rely on your near endless strength too much for my own comfort. I don’t want for you to have to be strong for the both of us, I don’t want to admit that this overwhelms me to a point where coping no longer seems possible… But I must. Funny, how two adults who are crumbling dangerously at the seams can be kept afloat by a child who is blissfully unaware of the problems they are facing.

I remember when this realisation truly settled in my mind. Two years ago, when the nightmares had started to plague her sleep more frequently, we were in Redcliffe on Warden business. She’d come through from her room across the hall in near silent tears, choked down in the terror of being overheard by a demon in the dark. I’d awoken before she so much as touched the door, sleep being little more than a learned habit, and therefore was able to scoop her into my arms without her needing to ask. The space between us is safe in her mind, and folding her into the blankets against your back will still dispel most of her distress. After sleep had peacefully claimed her once more, I lay awake still, watching the two most important things in my life, and thinking. A sprawl of honey-gold hair across your pillow, a soft warmth tucked up against my chest, the idle flick of an ear in sleep, the shape of your nut-brown shoulder shifting out from under the blankets… We seemed almost normal.

When I first left Antiva, I had no reason to keep living. Now I have two. Sometimes I remember that it really is that simple. In you, I find strength and passion. In her, I have balance. That is all I could ever ask for.

We are tired, weathered people. We have seen and felt and heard, altogether far too much. So with a smile, if you’ll permit me, I propose a dance. A weaving set of complex steps through all the grief and hope and conflict to come, and we shall call it living. ‘Our own battles’ as you so rightly put in ink.

Forgive me. Maybe one day I will let you read these letters, but for now, it is enough to let the words flow, then keep them locked safely away. I shall put this one with the others before you wake, as I feel I have written enough for now.

Thank you.

\-- Zevran

**Author's Note:**

> I apologise that this is so short, but it was never meant to be much more than this. I do want to write more for Zevran and Verdandi, because their relationship has permeated my personal canon to an alarming degree. 
> 
> Thank you for reading, and good night.
> 
> I have tumblr: Joeyharker  
> I also take drabble requests.


End file.
